Almost immediately after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the United States and the European Union (EU) started a battle over Passenger Name Records (PNR). After the attacks, the United States began to assign risk-assessment ratings to all travelers entering and exiting the country. As part of this risk assessment, the United States gathered passenger information, in the form of PNRs, from airline records. This information was shared among domestic and international law-enforcement agencies as part of a datasharing agreement. Despite an ostensible motivation to collaborate on the agreement, "the United States and the European Union have struggled to find common legal justification for PNR transfers."5 Specifically, after the European Court of Justice (ECJ) struck the data-sharing agreement between the European Union and the United States, a small legal-war regarding the use and sharing of PNRs erupted between data-privacy advocates and nationalsecurity promoters who believe security interests trump privacy concerns.

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Citation Information

Arthur Rizer,Dog Fight: Did the International Battle over Airline Passenger Name Records Enable the Christmas-Day Bomber?, 60Cath. U. L. Rev.77 (2011). Available at:http://scholarship.law.edu/lawreview/vol60/iss1/5